As Michael notes, there can also be reductions in suffering that result from these side effects of meat consumption, unless one’s morality is purely focused on harm caused by humans and doesn’t count natural harms prevented by humans. These good and bad side effects on wild animals seem important, though in many cases it’s not obvious what their net balance is. For example, does crop cultivation reduce or increase total wild-animal suffering? How about pasture grazing? Climate change? Eutrophication? I’ve attempted to analyze the net impacts of these things in various articles on my website, but coming to any firm conclusions is difficult. Because of the uncertainty regarding the wild-animal side effects, it seems reasonable to err on the side of reducing the much more certain harm to farm animals, although in the case of beef production, I think the ratio of (wild-animal side effects) / (harm to farm animals) is large enough that we should also give significant attention to the wild-animal side effects as best we can estimate them.
The exact ratio of (wild-animal side effects) / (harm to farm animals) will depend a lot on how much weight you give to brain complexity. If you simply count number of individual animals affected, as Michael explains, these ratios will be quite large (especially if invertebrates are included).
Organic crop production sometimes uses insecticides, and other organic methods of pest control can be painful as well (such as introducing natural predators/parasites/pathogens), although some organic pest-control methods seem like they’d cause less bug suffering, such as crop rotation, selection of plant hybrids to use, and harvest timing. In addition to pest control, crop cultivation kills lots of bugs via crushing (during tilling, planting, harvesting, etc), and there are lots of other side effects that growing plants has on bug suffering, both good and bad. So I certainly wouldn’t use a ratio of ~100 for the difference between organic and non-organic crop production. It’s not even clear to me if organic is better than non-organic.
Do you expect pest control and crop cultivation deaths to cause more suffering through the direct harms than they prevent by reducing populations?
Maybe since the populations have such high growth rates, they’re mostly limited by the carrying capacities, so pest control might have almost no effect on population size. Similarly, the main population effects from crop cultivation would be through how much food is available, not the cultivation deaths.
A main reason I’m uncertain about the sign of crop cultivation is that I don’t know if it reduces total invertebrate populations. Especially when irrigation and fertilization are used, crop net primary productivity can be somewhat higher than that of native grassland, although I also get the impression that farm fields can also be less rich in soil fauna than native ecosystems (maybe partly due to pesticides?).
so pest control might have almost no effect on population size
I assume that insecticides are usually pretty effective at reducing populations of target (and probably at least some non-target) insect species.
OTOH, crops fields can sometimes breed much larger insect infestations than would occur in a wild ecosystem. Berryman (2008): “growing extensive monocultures of a particular plant genotype may provide a huge amount of highly susceptible food for insects that feed on that crop, and/or may create an environment that is less hospitable for some of the natural predators and parasites that attack them.” That said, I feel like wild plants can also have big insect infestations. I’ve seen hundreds of aphids on a single wild plant near my house.
As Michael notes, there can also be reductions in suffering that result from these side effects of meat consumption, unless one’s morality is purely focused on harm caused by humans and doesn’t count natural harms prevented by humans. These good and bad side effects on wild animals seem important, though in many cases it’s not obvious what their net balance is. For example, does crop cultivation reduce or increase total wild-animal suffering? How about pasture grazing? Climate change? Eutrophication? I’ve attempted to analyze the net impacts of these things in various articles on my website, but coming to any firm conclusions is difficult. Because of the uncertainty regarding the wild-animal side effects, it seems reasonable to err on the side of reducing the much more certain harm to farm animals, although in the case of beef production, I think the ratio of (wild-animal side effects) / (harm to farm animals) is large enough that we should also give significant attention to the wild-animal side effects as best we can estimate them.
The exact ratio of (wild-animal side effects) / (harm to farm animals) will depend a lot on how much weight you give to brain complexity. If you simply count number of individual animals affected, as Michael explains, these ratios will be quite large (especially if invertebrates are included).
Organic crop production sometimes uses insecticides, and other organic methods of pest control can be painful as well (such as introducing natural predators/parasites/pathogens), although some organic pest-control methods seem like they’d cause less bug suffering, such as crop rotation, selection of plant hybrids to use, and harvest timing. In addition to pest control, crop cultivation kills lots of bugs via crushing (during tilling, planting, harvesting, etc), and there are lots of other side effects that growing plants has on bug suffering, both good and bad. So I certainly wouldn’t use a ratio of ~100 for the difference between organic and non-organic crop production. It’s not even clear to me if organic is better than non-organic.
Do you expect pest control and crop cultivation deaths to cause more suffering through the direct harms than they prevent by reducing populations?
Maybe since the populations have such high growth rates, they’re mostly limited by the carrying capacities, so pest control might have almost no effect on population size. Similarly, the main population effects from crop cultivation would be through how much food is available, not the cultivation deaths.
A main reason I’m uncertain about the sign of crop cultivation is that I don’t know if it reduces total invertebrate populations. Especially when irrigation and fertilization are used, crop net primary productivity can be somewhat higher than that of native grassland, although I also get the impression that farm fields can also be less rich in soil fauna than native ecosystems (maybe partly due to pesticides?).
I assume that insecticides are usually pretty effective at reducing populations of target (and probably at least some non-target) insect species.
OTOH, crops fields can sometimes breed much larger insect infestations than would occur in a wild ecosystem. Berryman (2008): “growing extensive monocultures of a particular plant genotype may provide a huge amount of highly susceptible food for insects that feed on that crop, and/or may create an environment that is less hospitable for some of the natural predators and parasites that attack them.” That said, I feel like wild plants can also have big insect infestations. I’ve seen hundreds of aphids on a single wild plant near my house.